Teaching Tips

Recording and Sharing a Narrated PowerPoint Presentation

  1. Create your slides and prepare what you plan to say about each one. Divide your lecture into sub-topics to keep the videos short and easier to upload.
  2. To reduce the size of your file, compress any images:
  3. Record a slide show with narration and slide timings.
    • PowerPoint files with narration are usually too large to upload to Canvas directly. Even if you can upload your PowerPoint file to Canvas, your students might not be able to play it. Therefore, the next step is to save your narrated PowerPoint as a video.
  4. Save a presentation as a movie file or MP4.
    • Choose one of the lower resolution options. Depending what version of PowerPoint you have, this might be Standard, HD, or Internet Quality.
    • PowerPoint 2016 for Mac doesn’t support saving in a video format. Other versions of PowerPoint for macOS (2011, 2019, and the Office 365 subscription – but not the online version of PowerPoint) do support this feature. As a CSU student, you have free access to Office 365 from Software Downloads.
  5. Upload your video to Microsoft Teams or other video hosting platform:

*Students can use these same directions to record and share PowerPoint presentations.